She looks over at me and I see the concern in her eyes. I put on a fake cheery grin, fan myself comically to let her know why I’m over here in the shade. She smiles and rejoins the conversation, I even keep up an extremely animated conversation with the art dealer beside me so she can see I’m enjoying myself in the moments that she sneaks a peek at me, thinking I don’t notice.
Midway through talking about the par something on the eighth hole in Pebble Beach, my phone vibrates in my pocket. I’m happy to excuse myself and disappear inside to the air-conditioned reception of the vineyard. I take off my jacket, away from anyone’s view and sit down. It’s the text I was waiting for. Sonya Schiffer, a woman I contacted a few months ago as soon as I heard I was coming to Santa Barbara. Communicating with her behind Cat’s back has stirred those old feelings inside me that I used to get when arranging nights out or nights away from Gina, but when I feel the feeling it is accompanied by guilt. My conscience has grown since meeting her, but it doesn’t remove the need I have to get away and meet this other woman. I think hard about how to get away from here, I had a plan in action but now that I’m here I need to rethink it. Our hotel is further from the venue than I thought, it isn’t easy for me to slip away, I must arrange a shuttle bus or get a lift from somebody, and if I feign sickness I’m sure Cat will want to come too. The music will start shortly and Cat loves to dance. She’ll be up all night dancing non-stop with anyone and everyone, like she always does. She’s a beautiful dancer and usually I watch her, but perhaps that’s my time to escape. Wild horses couldn’t drag her away from a dance floor. I can say I’m jetlagged or that I’ve a dodgy stomach. I had oysters for my starter.
Our inn is twenty minutes away from here, the hotel I’ve arranged to meet Sonya in Santa Barbara is forty minutes away. I need to get to our hotel to get the car and drive to the city. Can I make it? Meet Sonya, and be back in time before the wedding is over, before Cat finds me gone? I don’t know, but the sooner I go the better the chances. When she sees me coming towards her she looks concerned. I rub my belly and explain to her, in a rush, that I must get back to our bedroom toilet. She knows I don’t like to use the toilet when I’m out and about. I tell her I won’t be long, I need to change my shirt too, I’m embarrassed; enjoy yourself, I’ll be fine, I’ll come back for the dancing. She wants to take care of me, of course. Cat is a nurturer but she also likes her space having lived alone for twenty years and is good at giving it to others and so I leave the party. I have a quick shower, change into a clean shirt and pants, take my overnight bag and drive to Santa Barbara.
The meeting place is a motel and I park in the car park and climb the stairs to the second floor. At the end of the corridor all the doors of the bedrooms have been left open as I was informed they would for the room trading. I know Sonya straight away, I recognise her from her photograph and also because she’s the only woman. At seventy-four years old she has published two books about marbles, playing and collecting, and is one of the leading experts in the marble world. I have asked her here to value my marbles, or rather Hamish O’Neill has, and after sharing photographs with her of my collection she was sufficiently intrigued to agree to come. At over three hundred pounds, and with arthritis in both knees, she is surrounded by fanatics eager to get a moment of her time. But as soon as I enter, it’s just me and her. She, like me, wants to get straight down to business. The four rooms on this floor are all involved in the room trading, where people can discuss, swap, value their marbles. I’ve been to marble conventions before as Hamish O’Neill and have always thrived on the pure buzz of being surrounded by people as committed to marbles as I am. Seeing their eyes light up at the sight of a mint condition Guinea cobra or a striped transparent or an exotic swirl or even at a sample box they haven’t seen before, or haven’t seen in the flesh, reminds me that I’m not alone in being mesmerised by this world. Of course some of the people are even nuttier than me, spending their entire lives and savings on collecting without ever playing, but I always feel among friends at these meets, like I can truly be myself, though it’s under my brother’s name.
I owned both of Sonya’s books before I contacted her. I had bought one in particular with the intention of trying to value my own collection but quickly realised I could be easily misled and tricked. I contacted her on the Internet, one of the most knowledgeable collectors there is. I haven’t brought my entire collection, I couldn’t have afforded the airline’s weight charges nor could I have fitted any more in my bag without Cat suspecting. I’ve brought what I think are the most valuable. I haven’t brought them to sell them – that I made abundantly clear to Sonya Schiffer. I don’t know if I’ll ever sell them or not; I always thought I never would, but the time is coming close. The banks are after me for an apartment I own in Roscommon, a stupid investment in an apartment block in the middle of nowhere that cost too much at the time and now is worth nothing. Because the school, shopping centre and anything else that was in the plans didn’t go ahead, I can’t let the apartment, never mind sell it, which leaves me in a difficult position of trying to pay the mortgage as well as my own.
I need to start gathering my pieces and seeing what I have in play.
Despite the fact that I have driven and need to drive back, Sonya insists that we drink whisky together. I have a feeling that my response has a great bearing on whether she values the pieces or not. She has come for a night out, not to be rushed. I can worry about the car tomorrow, give an excuse to Cat, I don’t know what yet. I’ll come up with something.
‘My, my, you have quite the collection,’ Sonya says as we sit down at a table in a bedroom. People swirl around us, talk, swap, play, even watch her at work, but they’re not registering in my mind. I keep my eye on her. She’s huge, so big her arse sticks out on both sides of the chair. She thinks I’m Hamish O’Neill, winner of the World Championship of 1994, individual best player in the same year. She wants to talk about that for a while and I don’t mind reliving my glory days when there are very few people I can tell the story to. I tell her all about it in detail, how we beat the Germans’ ten-in-a-row run and the bar fight that broke out afterwards between Spud on my team and one of the German teammates, and USA having to act as peacemakers. We laugh about it and I can tell that she’s impressed and we return to the marbles.
‘I bought your book to value them myself but I quickly learned there’s an art to it, one that I couldn’t master,’ I say. ‘I learned there are more reproductions out there than I thought.’
She looks at me intently. ‘I wouldn’t worry about reproductions as much as people want you to worry, Hamish. When it comes to the collectable world, reproductions are not a new thing. Sparklers and sunbursts were an attempt to mimic onionskins, cat’s eyes an attempt to mimic swirls. Bricks, slags, Akro and carnelian agates and ’ades were an attempt to mimic hand-cut stones, but despite this, all these marbles – except of course cat’s eyes – are highly collectable today.’
I smile, thinking of my joke with Cat about her not being collectable at all, though she is the most valuable thing in my life, and Sonya looks at me over her glasses which are low on her nose. She watches me, as if evaluating me and not the marbles, twirls them around with the 10x loupe in her thick fat fingers, gold rings squished down on most fingers, with fat gathering around them. Those suckers are never coming off. ‘But usually everyone and everything is mimicking something or other.’
I swallow, thinking it’s a direct evaluation of me. As if she knows I’m not Hamish O’Neill, but she couldn’t possibly.
After a time studying, during which I’ve downed too much whisky, she speaks, ‘You’ve got some reproductions here and this, this has been repaired to fix a fracture, see the tiny creases and the cloudiness in the marble?’
I nod.
‘That’s from re-heating the glass. And you’ve a few fantasies,’ she says, moving everything around. ‘Items that never existed in original form. Polyvinyl bags with old labels,’ she looks disgusted. ‘But
no, you’re generally looking good here. You obviously have a good eye.’
‘I hope so. We’ll see, won’t we?’
‘Yes, we will.’ She looks at the collection and laughs wheezily. ‘Hope you’ve got time, because this will take all night.’
It is four a.m. when somebody called Bear drops me back at the inn in a pickup truck and speeds off. I can barely see straight after downing a bottle of whisky with Sonya. I try to concentrate on the path ahead of me and fall with my bag of marbles into the vines. Laughing, I pull myself out and stumble to the room.
As the pickup truck passed the vineyard I saw to my surprise that the wedding had wrapped up and there wasn’t a guest in sight, not even my Cat. Unusual for an Irish wedding, though I suppose we aren’t in Ireland and I should have known that it would be over early, with such a conservative bunch. I stumble into the inn, receiving angry glares from the owner who had to let me in at such an hour, and I bang into everything, door frames, furniture, on the way to the stairs. When I reach the bedroom, as if by magic Cat pulls the door open, hurt written all over her face.
‘Where the hell have you been?’
I know I’ve done it again. No matter what I think about myself, how I think I can change, I always slip back into hurting people. The Hamish in me comes out, but I can’t blame him any more, I never really could. It’s me. It’s always been me.
I wait in my car for Lea as she gets ready for the party. I blare the heating, trying to dry my jeans, which stick to my legs. I take the inventory out of my bag again and flick through it. Scanning his lifetime of memories, all catalogued in a neat script. I look through the photographs I took of the newspaper article on the Marble Cat wall. It’s grainy and Dad is hiding in the back row, but it’s him all right. For the first time I notice the date on the newspaper.
I call Mam, who answers quickly for so late at night.
‘Mam, hi, I hope I didn’t wake you.’
‘Not at all, we’re still up drinking wine – Robert is drunk-tweeting NASA,’ she giggles as I hear Robert in the background shouting about aliens waving at him from the moon. ‘We’re out on the balcony watching the moon, isn’t it marvellous? I should have known you’d be awake, you know you could never sleep as a little girl when there was a full moon? You used to sneak into our bed. I remember Fergus brought you downstairs for a hot chocolate one night, I found you both sitting in the dark at the kitchen table, him asleep, you looking outside.’
The moon made us do it.
I smile at the image. ‘I haven’t changed much.’
‘Did the boys have a great day?’ she asks.
‘The best.’
She laughs. ‘And I’m sure you have too. Nice to have the day to yourself. You don’t get that much.’
Silence.
‘Everything okay?’
‘Do you remember my thirteenth birthday party? We had a marquee in the back garden, didn’t we?’
‘Yes, about thirty people, catering, the works.’
‘Was Dad there? I can’t really remember.’
‘Yes, he was.’
‘So he wasn’t away that day?’ The newspaper report is dated the day of my birthday, though it refers to the championships being held the day before.
She sighs. ‘It was a long time ago, Sabrina.’
‘I know, but can you remember?’
‘Of course he was there, he was there in all the photographs, remember?’
I remember now. Me in my short skirt and high heels, looking like a tart. I can’t believe Mum let me dress like that, though I know I didn’t give her much choice.
‘And what about the day before?’
‘What did you find out, Sabrina? Just spit it out,’ she snaps.
I’m taken aback by her coldness.
‘I suspected,’ she fills my silence, ‘which is probably what you’re about to tell me, that he was having an affair, away with somebody. He said he was in London for a conference, but when I called the hotel they had no record of him. I suspected something, he’d been doing his usual secretive thing leading up to that, heading off to places I knew he wasn’t going to. He did that a lot. He came home the day of your birthday. I confronted him, I can’t remember now, but he managed to weasel his way out of it as usual. Made me feel like I was going crazy, as usual. Why? What did you find out? Who was she? Was it that Regina woman? God knows there were many others, but he never admitted to her. I always thought they were together before we split.’
‘I don’t think he was with another woman, Mum. He was having a love affair all right, but not the one you think.’ I take a deep breath. ‘He was at the World Marble Championships in England. His team of six men, the Electric Slags, won. A newspaper published a photograph and an article about it on the day of my birthday. He’s hiding in the back, but I know that it’s him.’
‘What! Marble championships? What on earth are you talking about?’ She slurs as she talks and I don’t think this is the best time to discuss it with her. I was wrong, I should have waited, but I couldn’t.
‘I told you about them, Mum, he’s been playing marbles all his life, competitively. Secretly. He’s been collecting them too.’
She’s silent. So much to take in, I’m sure.
‘It’s him in the photograph, but he used a different name. Hamish O’Neill.’
I can hear her intake of breath. ‘Sweet Jesus! Hamish was his brother, his older brother who died when Fergus was young. He wouldn’t talk much about him, but I learned a few things about him over the years. Fergus thought the world of him. O’Neill was his mother’s maiden name.’
So Mattie was right. This was all about Hamish. Hamish died using Dad’s name, Dad in turn took Hamish’s name. I don’t know if I’ll ever truly know why. I don’t know if I need to.
‘There was a best individual player trophy for a Hamish O’Neill. I met with his team, they say that Dad is Hamish.’
Mum is quiet. Food for thought, I can’t even imagine the memories she is accessing as she tries to understand it and piece it all together.
‘Mum?’
‘And he won this the day before your thirteenth birthday?’
‘Yes.’
‘But why didn’t he tell me?’
‘He didn’t tell anyone,’ I say. ‘Not his family, not his friends.’
‘But why?’
‘I think he was trying to breathe life back into his brother. Honour him in some way. I think he didn’t think anybody else would understand. That they’d think it was weird.’
‘It is weird,’ she snaps, then sighs and goes quiet. Then, as if she’s feeling guilty, she adds, ‘Nice though. To honour him.’ Silence. ‘Who on earth was I married to?’ she asks quietly.
I don’t know how to answer that, but I do know that I no longer want my husband asking the same thing of me.
Lea slowly lowers herself into the front seat wearing a neutral-coloured bandage dress, black leather jacket, smelling of perfume, caked in make-up and almost unrecognisable as the girl-next-door nurse I see most days.
‘Too much?’ she says anxiously.
The colour of the dress makes her look naked. ‘No,’ I say, starting up the engine. ‘So tell me about where we’re going.’
‘You know just about as much as I do.’
I throw her a warning look. ‘Lea.’
‘What?’ she giggles. ‘I met him online. His name is Dara. He’s delicious. We haven’t met in person, but you know …’ She shrugs.
‘No, I don’t know, tell me.’
‘Well we met on an online dating site. We’ve Skyped a few times. You know,’ she repeats, like I should know something.
‘No, I don’t know. What?’
She keeps on staring at me, jerking her head at me as if it will spark the answer, which it in fact does.
‘Oh!’ I say suddenly.
‘Yes, now you’ve got it.’ She faces front again. ‘So we’re pretty much well acquainted, but we haven’t actually met yet.’
/> ‘You’ve had Skype sex and you’re nervous about meeting him?’ I laugh.
‘My camera had a filter,’ she explains. ‘I don’t.’
‘And what does this mysterious Dara do that he knows where we can find marbles at eleven o’clock at night?’
‘He does wood carvings. For chairs, tables, furniture. The party is at his office. I remember him saying there is a glass artist.’
I’m dubious.
We find the address of the full moon party that Dara gave her. We stare at it from across the river in silence, both deep in thought, probably thinking the same thing. We’ve been duped.
The address is a multistorey car park. It is on the graveyard site of a ripped-down old shopping centre which was to make way for a new €70 million state-of-the-art shopping centre and cinema yet never was and so the multistorey car park stands alone in the wilderness far from any businesses which can utilise its parking. The moon sits above it, big and full, guiding us to it like the North Star, keeping a watchful maternal eye over our progress. But I can’t help but think she’s laughing at us now.
It’s an enormous concrete monstrosity, but it’s old school, ugly and red brick, tight and low ceilings, unlike the spacious light-filled car parks of today. It climbs eight levels high, not a car in sight on any floor. Halfway up, on the fourth floor, a glow appears from the mesh-gridded openings.
‘Looks like he’s home,’ Lea says, trying to make light of it.
‘Do you smell smoke?’ I ask.
She sniffs and nods.